Today, NVIDIA unleashes their updated GeForce GTX 1080 and GeForce GTX 1060 graphics cards. Based on the same Pascal GPU as last year, the new cards feature updated designs and faster clock speeds for improved performance.

NVIDIA is unleashing both, the GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1060 graphics cards today. The graphics card utilize the GP104 and GP106 GPUs which launched last year. Although the core specifications remain the same, the memory has been updated with faster clock rates. This allows NVIDIA to harness more power/ performance gains out of the updated cards.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Update – $499 US Price and 11 Gb/s G5X Memory

The first update is for the GeForce GTX 1080 which was NVIDIA’s flagship GeForce offering before the 1080 Ti launch. This card was launched last year and more details on that could be seen here. NVIDIA launched the card at $699 US for the Founders Edition and $599 US for custom variants. A year later, NVIDIA is now offering a price update and selling the card for just $499 US, which is impressive.

The actual clock speeds are maintained at 1607 MHz base and 1733 MHz boost but the FinFET architecture allows for extreme overclocking as demoed at the event. The chip features 8 GB of GDDR5X (next-gen) memory featured across a 256-bit bus. Aside from the price update, the card also receives an updated memory architecture in the form of faster G5X memory. The new chips operate at 11 Gb/s which is the same speed as on the GTX 1080 Ti. The card will deliver bandwidth of 352 GB/s. This is a nice boost over the 320 GB/s which shipped as reference.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 11 Gbps Custom Models

The GeForce GTX 1060 is receiving an update in the form of faster memory across all models. The new GeForce GTX 1060 models will be shipping with 9 Gb/s GDDR5 chips that compared to 8 Gb/s, deliver 216 GB/s bandwidth. This is faster than the 192.2 GB/s on the original variants and we can also see some AIB specific price adjustments on the new models too.

Based on price to performance estimations, the updated GeForce GTX 1060 will be a direct competitor to the recently launched Radeon RX 580 graphics card from AMD. Both graphics cards will be priced very close to one another and will be aiming at the mainstream market under $300 US.